How Samuel Roukin created his fan-favorite 'Turn' character Simcoe

"He’s definitely a sociopath, it would seem," Roukin says of SImcoe, "based on his ability to zone the world out and concentrate on murdering someone. It’s not an instinct that we all possess."(Photo: Antony Platt/AMC)

"I hate and I love," British Army Captain John Graves Simcoe tells one of the soldiers under his command in AMC's Revolutionary War drama Turn: Washington's Spies. "Why I do so, perhaps you ask, I know not. But I feel it and I am in torment."

That line does as good a job as any when it comes to summing up the sociopathic Simcoe, who, over the course of the show's fourth and final season, will gradually transform into the respected Canadian statesman with his own statue and day in Toronto. ("There are references to Simcoe everywhere in Canada," confirms co-star Ksenia Solo, who grew up there and has been known to text photos of them to Roukin.)

Fortunately, for fans of Psycho Simcoe, Saintly Simcoe is still a ways off. In fact, when the show returns Saturday (9 ET/PT), he is still the same sadistic yet soft-spoken sociopath that made him a fan-favorite.

Even reading the pilot script years ago, Roukin, 36, realized his new character wasn't quite right in the head.

He points to a scene in that first episode in which Simcoe manhandles one of the Continental spies, Abraham Woodhull (Jamie Bell), when he confesses to smuggling but not to killing a British officer. "I've never killed anyone," Woodhull protests.

"I have," Simcoe states matter-of-factly. "Plenty, just like you."

And then, Roukin says, laughing, "He sends (Woodhull) on his way and says, 'Travel safe!' And I was like, 'This guy is a sociopath! This guy's dark.' "

But he didn't want to play Simcoe as a straight-up thug.

"I asked the question — at the very beginning when we shot the pilot: What would it be like if he were, in manner, the gentlest, nicest person you’ve ever met?" he recalls, adding that he even came up with a new, softer, higher-pitched voice for the character the day of the first table read. "What would that be like if we coupled that with the things that he does and says? And it took us down a really interesting road."

Among the cold-blooded Simcoe's acts: Stabbing a suspected spy in the jugular at the dinner table ("He was spying," Roukin protests. It wasn't like he didn't deserve it!"); terrorizing an entire Long Island village; poisoning his commander's beloved horse and shooting a loyalist judge to frame the relatives of Continental intelligence officers.

He knows his value, too: While negotiating to accept command of a regiment of provincial soldiers, the Royal officer balks, explaining, "It seems to me that while murdering savages can be purchased on any corner, those that can command other murdering savages are a rarer commodity."

What does Roukin count as his favorite "Evil Simcoe" scene?

"There’s one I’ll never forget," he says, recalling an ambush from Season 2. "Simcoe takes someone’s ear off, puts a knife through it, prior to which he bayonets the guy through the throat."

Why that one? It barely registers on the Simcoe scale of sociopathy.

"That was the day my second son was born and I left set to be at the delivery," he explains. "And then I returned to bayonet someone through the throat. I’ll never really forget doing that scene and it will always sort of be a special day in my life."

Roukin does point out that Simcoe did have a few good qualities: His belief in equality, for one.

"He gives (slave-turned-soldier) Akinbode (Aldis Hodge) his freedom," he says. "And I think that was a really important moment in the character’s arc. I think it was also an important moment in the show, too, because the British really did have a different view of (slavery). One of the things about Simcoe is that he’s still a human being and even though he does terrible things, he still has the same wants and needs as everybody else and so he is capable of kindness and he is capable of love. He just perhaps hasn’t had the right opportunities."

For the real Simcoe, those chances arose after the war in the British colony of Upper Canada, when he served as a member of Parliament who described slavery as an offense against Christianity and, as lieutenant governor, sought to abolish it.

"The truth is that the Canadian reverence for Simcoe is for his life after the Revolution. Everything that’s on record that he did in Canada does have merit and should be celebrated. And I’ve always been OK with the juxtaposition of wartime activity and postwar activity. I think humans behave very differently in a war than they do when they’re back home and on to their next thing."

Freed slave Akinbode (Aldis Hodge) is one of SImcoe's most trusted and skilled men.(Photo: Antony Platt/AMC)